Simon Shows Poor Form by Offering a Fleeting Glimpse of Tax Returns

Step up, step up, California! I gotcher top-secret Bill Simon tax returns right here, every last page! It’s a miracle of the campaign, a spin-defying stunt, and there’s only one place you can lay your peepers on these papers--right here!

How did I accomplish this feat, you may ask? How did I outwit the Simon campaign, which gave reporters only a few hours to digest a thousand pages that would leave Alan Greenspan puzzling?

How did I put one over on my own colleagues, who had to turn clockwise three times, say “Mother, may I?” and give the secret cub-reporter handshake, just to be allowed in the door to take a gander?

High-tech and chutzpah, my friends, high-tech and chutzpah. As I flipped through the pages, I switched on a high-speed spy video camera hidden in the pink azaleas on my hat ... and then, borrowing a page from that American heroine Fawn Hall, who smuggled out classified documents for her Iran-Contra boss Oliver North, I too simply dropped the video into my high boots and strolled out.

And what did I find? Shockers, ladies and gentlemen. You may want to cover the kiddies’ ears. Trusts that make the CIA look as forthright as a church picnic. Shelters to make the Caymans blush. There’s more, plenty more, and for the small price of admission, my friends, you too can gaze upon these fiscal freaks. Who will be first? Thank you, sir, go right on in. Don’t be shy, folks, come right on up--this way to the egress.

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I didn’t really see the thousand-plus pages that the Simon campaign laid out for the press. I wasn’t there in the Santa Barbara Room of the Hyatt Hotel in Sacramento on Monday. And if I had been, even campaign drones might have noticed something suspicious about a woman wearing boots in July.

So I don’t know what was in those pages. The point is, even people who saw them don’t know what was in them, either.

It was an exercise in the ridiculous, and in a kind of inverted political genius. For months Bill Simon has been campaigning as man whose business acumen can redeem California.

But when it came to particulars--such as the tax returns that virtually every candidate up to and including George W. Bush customarily makes public--Simon’s message was that they’re private, and voters should simply take it on faith that when it comes to business, a rich guy knows what’s what.

Gray Davis’ campaign was trumpeting every squirming minute of these months, and it got under Simon’s skin. At one point he compared Davis to some hybrid of Karl Marx and Big Brother for harping on whether Simon paid his “fair share.”

But of late, with some of the nation’s top CEOs rampaging through their firms like serial killers, Simon’s tangled lines of defense weren’t going to work much longer, even after he rather desperately promised to disclose his returns if he were elected--the tax version of Richard Nixon’s promise to reveal a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War only if Americans elected him president.

At last--and here’s where the devilish campaign genius comes in--the exasperated Simon campaign said, fine.

You want his tax returns?

OK, pal, here they are, whomp, whomp, two huge volumes, more than a thousand pages in all, a decade’s worth of returns.

You’ve got until 9 p.m. No cameras, no recorders, no photocopying, and no ringers--meaning no professional tax experts who might actually understand what they’re looking at.

So start writing, suckers.

On short notice, a few political reporters get a few hours to sort through a decade’s worth of immensely complex taxes and figure out what’s going on--a single hit-and-run chance to see tax documents that Simon surely had a squadron of accountants working for weeks to prepare.

This wasn’t showing tax returns, it was flashing them.

Now the campaign can say with bland truth: Oh yes, we released our tax returns.

(This may not put an end to it, if it’s the Internal Revenue Service and not mere reporters insisting on answers. The IRS recently filed court papers that name Simon and others as beneficiaries of a tax shelter that the government says could be illegal. Simon was not accused of wrongdoing, and describes the matter as a dispute between the IRS and the accounting firm of KPMG. The IRS has demanded documents from KPMG and another accounting firm for an investigation of what federal officials call abusive tax shelters. The IRS matter upped the pressure on Simon to show his hand.)

The campaign is counting on the likelihood that, come November, no one but the press and the late-night comedy writers will remember the preposterous conditions, like the fact that the Simon campaign only wanted reporters to use special Simon-supplied paper to take notes on. (Was it infused with disappearing ink?)

It’s politics, without a doubt, perhaps politics at its manipulative best. But as is so often the case, it’s also a long way from democracy.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@ latimes.com